"Oh!" he said, suddenly recurring to her; "let me introduce you to Mrs.
Pasmer, Mr. Mavering," and the latter made a bow that creased his
waistcoat at about the height of Mrs. Pasmer's pretty little nose.

His waistcoat had the curve which waistcoats often describe at his age;
and his heavy shoulders were thrown well back to balance this curve. His
coat hung carelessly open; the Panama hat in his hand suggested a certain
habitual informality of dress, but his smoothly shaven large handsome
face, with its jaws slowly ruminant upon nothing, intimated the
consequence of a man accustomed to supremacy in a subordinate place.

Mrs. Pasmer looked up to acknowledge the introduction with a sort of
pseudo-respectfulness which it would be hard otherwise to describe.
Whether she divined or not that she was in the presence of a magnate of
some sort, she was rather superfluously demure in the first two or three
things she said, and was all sympathy and interest in the meeting of
these old friends. They declared that they had not seen each other for
twenty years, or, at any rate, not since '59. She listened while they
disputed about the exact date, and looked from time to time at Mr. Munt,
as if for some explanation of Mr. Mavering; but Munt himself, when she
saw him last, had only just begun to commend himself to society, which
had since so fully accepted him, and she had so suddenly, the moment
before, found her self hand in glove with him that she might well have
appealed to a third person for some explanation of Munt. But she was not
a woman to be troubled much by this momentary mystification, and she was
not embarrassed at all when Munt said, as if it had all been
pre-arranged, "Well, now, Mrs. Pasmer, if you'll let me leave you with
Mr. Mavering a moment, I'll go off and bring that unnatural child to you;
no use dragging you round through this crowd longer."